While GitHub has been slowly adding AI-powered features for developers over the last couple of years, the Microsoft-owned company has gone a step further with its latest feature called GitHub Spark, which allows users to create an app by simply giving prompts in natural language.
The new feature, currently an experiment under the GitHub Next labs, gives users the choice between using an OpenAI GPT model or a Claude Sonnet model. Notably, while OpenAI has tuned its latest models for developers, Claude’s Sonnet models continue to generate buzz in developer circles for their technical reasoning and debugging abilities.
With Spark, GitHub allows users to quickly build a small web app or ‘micro app’ using natural language. Unlike other GitHub tools, Spark doesn’t just generate code for the app but also runs it and displays an interactive preview that can be further refined through additional prompts.
Interestingly, Spark can also be used to brainstorm ideas using its revision variants option. For instance, if a user isn’t entirely sure how their micro app should look, they can ask the AI to create a set of 3–6 variants, each with subtle yet meaningful differences to refine their vision.
GitHub also provides a number of options with Spark to improve the app-building process, including one-click deployment, Copilot agent collaboration, and a model selector. Users can choose between Claude 3.5 Sonnet, OpenAI’s o1-preview, o1-mini, and GPT-4o.
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, praising the new feature in a post on X (formerly Twitter), wrote, “In the last five decades of software development, producing software required manually converting human language into programming language, compiling it, debugging it, testing it – and then going back to more coding. Today, we take a step toward the ideal magic of creation: the idea in your head becomes reality in a matter of minutes.”
GitHub Spark is currently only available to the company’s CoPilot Pro+ users which is priced at $39 per month or $390 per year. It includes up to 375 Spark messages per month while additional messages can be bought as needed with an extra prompt costing $0.16.
